154 comments to Energy crisis in Australia: Feds versus State

A fake energy crisis in the year of fake. Takes attention away from the vapid state of government policy on anything worthwhile whilst inevitably netting more profits for big electricity which once upon a time was a public serving utility.

In SA even the ABC has allowed what might be called (anywhere else) scepticism to creep in about Weatherdill’s “If in trouble blame Canberra” tactic. He is desperately trying to keep the Labor government afloat in the run up to the election a year away.

What a mess we have here in SA, they think building new gas fired power stations is the solution, that is just wrong; the major suppliers of gas have over committed themselves in contracts to Japan. hence there is no gas for new gas fired power stations in SA. Ther are two solutions that make sense, they are nuclear or high efficiency coal, at least we have the mineral resources to supply these options.

One thing Weatherill has said at will help gas supply, if he carries it out, is to give royalties on gas extracted to the land holder. If that happened in NSW see all the “Locked Gates” all open and the demise of of the Greens in the country. There would be a queue miles long to get gas companies to drill for CSG and shale gas on their land. In NSW there were areas in the Hunter Valley and across the mountains from Lithgow to Rylstone were land owners had mineral rights but Nifty Nev stole them and lined his pocket and those of some of his union mates. The large supply of oil and gas in USA (especially the Gulf states such as Texas is due to land owners having mineral rights.

I doubt many land holders who currently don’t want fracking will allow fracking on their land for royalties. Those that do will be ostracised. It will result in division in communities. A lot like the division that wind farms have caused. This is destructive to rural communities.

The lock the gate campaign didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, nor even a rational leg, except for land where the title included mineral rights. Those mineral rights tended to be on land which was taken up in the gold rush era pre about 1890.. It has, however, given us tangible benefits in slowing willy nilly development.

Our historical policies on extractive industries have picked the eyes out of our resources, in many cases causing huge wastage that has been ignored to date. There should be a major policy reexamination of our whole extractive sector, aiming to minimize that wastage.

e.g. A company mining coal for a particular market may take only that part of the resource which meets the contract specs, while rendering unrecoverable coal which could have been sold on another market. Which results in new areas having to be opened up to repeat the process.

If fracking is allowed to go ahead without further consideration will we find that we mined only a small part of the resource but rendered a large part unrecoverable?

Ted,
“Fracking” breaks up the coal seam so that the methane trapped in it can be extracted. When coal is mined this gas is released to the atmosphere and is essentially wasted. By extracting the gas as a separate resources you leave the coal seam there for future mining if needed. This is actually a more efficient use of these resources.

Are you sure of that? How much of this gas is in coal? I thought a lot might be in other kinds of rock. Even if it is right attention should be given to ensuring that 1. wastage is minimised, and 2. that surface damage is minimised.

Any miner’s's leading concern is to maximise profit. This can be expected to result in “picking the eyes out of” a resource.

Yes indeed but later! Currently the world situation is like; “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands”! If the opposition states, “those terms are acceptable”!? OOps; now what? Atmospheric CO2 becomes meaningless! Those neighbors that accept “your own personal integrity”; will gladly help throw all the opponents into the volcano!

A recent study in Germany on a wind farm nearing the end of its life shows that it has consumed more energy (building, infrastructure, backup, maintenance etc) than it has produced in its life. On that basis you could cover the earth’s surface in windfarms and they would not generate sufficient energy to replace themselves. Some later farms probably improve on this marginally. Offshore and less favoured sites are of course even worse. When you add pump storage you roughly half the overall efficiency. Work it out for yourself.

Andy,
You have that the wrong way around. If you have a site conducive to pumped hydro, you will struggle to find a better way to enhance the utility of a baseload power station. There are many examples around the world. The German experience shows pumped hydro works better for base load than renewballs, however, Scandinavia does well using Denmark’s excess renewballs.

I am confused by all this;surely this new SnowyII proposal is only a storage system;
No new energy or power is being introduced into the system. Where does the 2000 MW come in and for how long? One can only get back out of storage that which has been put in.
GeoffW

The best hydro is as we have it today in the Snowy and in Tassie. Dam water at high levels and use the energy as it falls. And use it selectively at times of peak demand 4-8 pm.
But the watermelons won’t allow any more dams.
So will pumped hydro be counted towards the RET? The stated capacity proposed for the new Snowy Scheme is 2000 MW. If that capacity could be used for 4 hours every day, that’s 2920 GWh or about 9% of the 2020 target of 33,000 GWh (even if it won’t be completed by then).
According to the Clean Energy Regulator, in 2015/16 renewables contributed 14.6% of our electricity production or about 20,000 GWh (including 6% hydro). Therefore by adding 2% of Snowy “renewable” to total supplies it will reduce the need for additional wind/solar “farms” by about 20%, providing base load low cost coal can be used to pump the water back up the hill.

I thought it was the Danes who dump wind energy over 10% to Norway and Sweden. Norway uses mostly run of river hydro so the capital costs are less. When Danish excess arrives they merely stop generating at a few sites (their hydro capacity exceeds Danish output). Sweden has a fair bit of pumped storage as their rivers don’t have such big falls, hence dams and higher capital cost. A lot of hydro in the USA and Canada is run of the river type.
The EU wants Norway to install pumped storage so it can handle more excess wind e.g. Germany, but there is resistance from those who don’t want dams spoiling the views (and having to pay for them).

The last figures I saw were that Denmark sells at $A26 a MWh and buys back at $A83. You would think that the Danes would remember that Norwegians used to be in the looting and pillaging business.

Sorry, no pumped Hydro in Sweden. We had one station (Storjuktan) but it is run as a pure hydro now. It is correct that we absorb some surplus danish wind power but it is done by closing down conventional hydro.
Incidentally Denmark + Germany wind power is approaching a level where neigbouring countries can no longer balance the swings, so Poland and Czechia are installing emergency cutoffs. Germany may go the way of SA next winter, it was very close this winter. And a long blackout at subzero temperatures is no joke.

“Except the efficiency is so low and the cost so high as to be a joke !! Remember. You have to build a DAM !!!”

Not at all! Any means of power storage\accumulation for later extraction of some of that power, (load leveling) must be considered. Neat controllable Thorium reactors,
with power on demand, must certainly reduce the need and expense of such power storage facility!

I like the idea of storing electrical energy as Aluminum and releasing it in a controlled thermite reaction to heat water and drive turbines. Not as efficient as a battery, but more efficient than pumping water, moreover; Aluminum can be stored safely in massive quantities, has a relatively high energy content when reacted with rust and is infinitely reusable.

Al2 + Fe2O3 -> Al2O3 + Fe2 + lots of heat

recycle the fuel:

Fe2 + air -> Fe2O3
Al2O3 + carbon + electricity = Al2 + CO2

We will definitely need the CO2 to supplement agriculture once we are out of fossil fuels to burn, or you can go nuts and recycle the carbon as well.

Energy like mass… is… but never stored! Power can be either ‘stored’ as ‘energy’, or converted to ‘work’ (structure of mass)! These can be similar, but always result in ‘loss of power’. Such loss is fictitiously accumulated only by humans as useless ‘entropy’! the units are sensible heat energy (joules) normalized by absolute temperature. Weirdly similar to specific heat of mass normalized by amount of mass. Has this any meaning whatsoever?

“I like the idea of storing electrical energy as Aluminum and releasing it in a controlled thermite reaction to heat water and drive turbines.”

OK but such is only a poor accumulation of power, for later conversion to work, never ‘generation of power’, like oxidation of carbon (coal), Carbon (hydro) being the accumulation of solar (nuclear) power (flux) by Earth plants. Nothing else except ‘nuclear’ has that efficiency of power storage for later conversion to ‘work’. Why are you four year olds still splashing in local puddles to demonstrate your ignorance?

“Not as efficient as a battery, but more efficient than pumping water, moreover; Aluminum can be stored safely in massive quantities, has a relatively high energy content when reacted with rust and is infinitely reusable.”

So you somehow oxidize Al to AlO2 then reduce that back to Al at horrible (in)efficiency! How does this nonsense ever produce any ‘work’?
All the best! -will-

Will,
The point is to store excess electricity as Al and get a significant return of the energy used to produce it by reacting it with rust. It’s far from 100% efficient, but is more efficient than other storage methods.

Will,
To put this in perspective, it takes about twice the energy to produce Al and Fe2O3 then the energy released by the thermite reaction. Given how safely Al can be stored, this is the safest way to store many GigaJoules of energy.

“Al can be stored, this is the safest way to store many GigaJoules of energy.”

Nowhere near the safety of skipping electricity, reducing CO2 to hydrocarbons direct with insolation and tree leaves, then oxidizing with free atmospheric O2, those same hydrocarbons back to CO2 + H2O + sensible heat power! Coal is but trees that have not ignited yet! God’s gift to Earthlings! It would be nice to say THANK YOU, rather than F**K YOU, as is the current governmental policy! How many years of coal have we, before nice, safe, Thorium reactors need be developed?
All the best! -will-

So they are panicking now that a large coal fired power station is about to be closed down. Funny that. They are wetting their pants wondering who will be holding the large bag of excrement next time there’s insufficient power to supply all three states at once. Turnbull as usual comes to the “rescue” with a plan that won’t be implement for several years if at all. Meanwhile the wetting of pants will increase. Oh this is going to be so much fun to watch over the next year or so. Who knows perhaps the global warming alarmists will blow a fuse over all this and demand we hasten the closing down of the rest of the coal fired power stations. That’s what happens when reality hits illogical people like Weatherill in their faces. They become even more illogical. It’s in their nature. I think I will get the noisiest and most polluting diesel backup home power generator I can find.

Weatherill wants SA Power Networks to install 20MW of diesel generators by December. Wants to get through summer without blackouts. Obviously any subsidies will cease on March 18, 2018 (the day after the State election).

Snowy 1.0 was constructed by an excellent bunch of good workers, mostly from Europe.
No doubt Snowy 2.0 will be built by those wonderful young specimens from the Apex gang in Victoria and those energetic geniuses from Lakemba in Sydney.

I’d just like to remind people esp. the federal government that Australia is a land of DROUGHT and flooding rain. I seem to recall that during the great drought at the start of this century (remember when governments wasted billions on de-sal plants) the snowy hydro’s electrical output was almost zero. No water = no hydro-power. So how is a slightly less unreliable power generator supposed to help cover for really unreliable power generators? Rain dances?

Anyway the government only a announced a “study” into this and going by past experience we can expect it to go no further than a puffed up press conference, back slaps all round, then into the bin with all the other great Turnbull innovations.

2 billion dollars seems like a lot just to drill some tunnels through rock. Does anyone know how much coal fired power station that would buy?

If I was the Mayor of Cooma, I’d be thinking of the biggest value I could and double it, no triple it.
It would be a huge boost to Cooma, plus infrastructure. I support the Mayor of Cooma and whatever value he promotes.

How is it that Turnbull and Weatherill cannot understand coal and gas electricity production is not profitable?

All anyone has to do is repeal the RET.

This is driving the whole insanity, closing working, efficient power stations, costing billions and killing both gas and coal. As even Turnbull points out, Australians are the biggest exporters of coal and gas but cannot afford to buy them?

Repeal the RET and the whole situation would fix itself overnight. The tens of billions of dollars building useless windmills would stop. Pelican point and Hazelwood would start immediately. The problem would vanish overnight and the windmills would still exist.

However Labor and the Liberals and the Greens are so besotted with Carbon Dioxide and replaceables, they cannot see the obvious.

No new $500Million gas plant. No new 100Mwatt diesel generator. No big batteries. No $30Million diesel for the submarine corporation. No $11million a month for Tasmania to pay for diesel. No new Snowy Mountain scheme. No subsidies for Port Pirie, Whyalla, Alcoa and more. Just get the Greens out of our power distribution.

Repeal the RET, Regressive Energy Carbon Tax and in one move, it is over. How complicated is that?

Bring back our real PM. He would stop this insanity in a day. Even the Senate might agree.

After all, in hindsight, what did he do to stop the drowning of 1,200 men, women and children? He stopped the boats. How simple was that? We heard how impossible it was, but it happened overnight and the tragedies stopped. Europe needs to note what he did. Immigration can continue, just not the criminal exercise.

Now stop the RET. It is that simple, a huge carbon tax to pay for tens of billions of dollars worth of imported windmills, solar panels, batteries no one needs and do not work. At 9c a kwhr, the RET is twice the price of electricity and it all goes overseas for windmills which do not work, power transmission lines which crumple in a light wind and thousands of tons of heavy metals and the destruction of our vistas and landscapes in the name of saving the planet. All for what? Nothing. There is no problem except the greed of politicians.

One hundred and twenty two grams of carbon dioxide was expelled into the local atmosphere during the writing of this item.
But, but, but, 87 grams of that was existing atmospheric O2! Damn, you gets no red thumbz!

Anyone ever heard of the Fabian Society? Kind of like a more civilised version of the Khmer Rouge, although they would bristle at that suggestion. Australia is I believe infested with some nasty Fabiain Soc types. Especially the south, it heaves with the stench of BS left wing thinking.

Their previous emblem was a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. Hence they try to undermine our society by stealth!

The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow.

How is it that Turnbull and Weatherill cannot understand coal and gas electricity production is not profitable?

Okay then, Hazelwood is 53 years old, and is not generating its original Nameplate of 1600MW, but it can still make 86% of that total, which is pretty astonishing after 53 years.

When it was new it ran at around a 90% Capacity Factor, and even now, after 53 years that has only dropped to around 60%, so effectively over its whole life it has managed (typical for large scale coal fired power) a CF of around 70% lifetime.

So, after 53 years, Hazelwood has generated 520.4 TWH of power, and I only expressed it that way because in MWH it’s a very long number.

520,349,760MWH

It has been delivering that power for around $30/MWH give or take.

So, from the sale of electricity alone, that comes in at

$15.615 BILLION.

and that comes in at around $295 Million a year.

Hmm!

There must have been some sort of profit in there for someone at least.

Just this Month alone, as the operators get all the blood they can out of this dying stone, so far running seven and eight Units, they’ll get almost %30 Million just from the sale of electricity, and they don’t need to worry about maintenance costs any more.

Amazing that no Australian politician can suggest fossil fuel solutions instead, if output from renewable power sources is not working, then more of the same must be the solution. A pumped storage dam presupposes there is excess electricity to pump water for later use when electricity is scarce. Wouldn’t that entail a massive expansion in wind and solar generating sources?

Pumped storage also assumes that excess water has fallen in the specific catchment region, enough to keep recycling it through two storage facilities. Plus topping it up to compensate for evaporation. Over the last half dozen years most of out dams had periods of only 20% capacity or less.

Simplest thing is to leave Hazelwood running. It needs to be upgraded. New boilers and safety systems are required. No-one at Hazelwood expected a shutdown till 2025. Their coal resource is ok till 2033. After that they would need to move the digging equipment to a new nearby tenement.

Batteries for wind turbines don’t fix the problem. The Grid cannot digest the RET. They are not compatible. Either the Grid goes or the RET goes. No-one is going to build a privately owned and financed base load power station while there is a RET.

Engie will not pay and no new power stations will be built, not gas nor coal, black nor brown. If the SA Government builds a new $500Million gas power station, they will have to pay RET as well. They could buy Pelican Point for a song, but could not afford to run it.

Besides we will soon run out of gas anyway, as Weatherill has noticed and especially now gas exploration and fracking have been banned. So what do they do? Everyone is buying giant diesels! Tasmania flew in hundreds of them.

Clever! Now there’s a sensible politicians response to Climate Change. As London is banning diesel, Weatherill is buying Diesel to subsidize windmill power?

Then Hazelwood is ‘old’. Rubbish. The Snowy Mountain scheme is 20 years older. Still they are both a lot easier to maintain than windmills no one can service. The RET could go in a single day.

Since the introduction of electricity, politicians have promised cheap, plentiful, reliable power and it has been delivered until now.

We have a new wrecking class of Green vote hungry politicians, ‘saving the planet’ but for whom? China, India, Russia, Pakistan or Indonesia do not care. 3.5Billion people who do not pay carbon taxes. Our politicians are the wreckers. They and they alone have manufactured this crisis from nothing and our genius PM says we should improve the Snowy Mountain, which would run dry in a week if it had to supply the grid.

Malcolm would do better to do his job and repeal the RET. Hazelwood alone produces 6,000 GWHR, more than his entire new Snowy Mountain scheme improvement of 2,000 GWHrs and he is forcing Hazelwood to close. It would cost nothing to keep it open.
Repeal the RET Malcolm, or Abbott will do it.

TdeF,
I agree the RET is deplorable. There’s an error in your logic regarding pumped hydro in that the water is reused, pumped up when power is cheap and let down when demand is high. It can respond very quickly with minimal instantaneous effort. It works a treat with any kind of baseload.It can make renewballs more stable but doesn’t make them anymore economic.

Pumped hydro has been used by Tasmania since the start. This can extend the water resource and act as an energy storage for intermittent solar and wind, a battery. Great. However Hazelwood is still bigger than the entire Snowy Scheme, even with this 50% increase. At present Hazelwood produces more steady power than all the windmills combined.

So if Malcolm or Weatherill wanted to provide power to the grid, give the $500Million to Hazelwood plus the $500million for the Snowy or just buy the place outright and have a solution tomorrow. Even better, at no cost remove the RET and Hazelwood would be profitable and open, the energy supply problem would be fixed and electricity prices would drop immediately x3.

What would be the political cost to Turnbull of doing the obvious, zero cost, simple thing? Why does Turnbull want this crisis? Who benefits or is he saving the world from Climate Change? Does our Chief Scientist also believe in Global Warming? Isn’t there a scientist in the public service, the CSIRO, the BOM, the Chief SCientist’s department who does not believe CO2 is poisonous and causing catastrophic warming? Are we truly run by the illiterati?

There would be very few dams that do not use pumped hydro if it was deemed appropriate at the design stage. Many times it is used to modify water temperatures. There are big losses in efficiency, especially for the turbine selection. The snowy proposal is not driven by “best option available”. If pumped hydro is necessary its best to go to every relevant water authority and ask them to put their best proposal forward based on an agreed selection criteria. There are several better options than that proposed by SMEG. They will only talk their own book.

In the end this is all about politics and not electricity. The politics is how can one party wedge the other party? Meanwhile voters are stuck with no choice or an independent who cannot govern, blackouts, bankruptcy and despair.

It seems that ‘their’ PM, not content with destroying light bulbs, putting in place the framework to destroy irrigation in the Murray/Darling Basin, signing for $60billion worth of underwater boats that are not even off the drawing board, supporting the useless NBN and ABC NOW wants to destroy the Snowy Mountain Scheme.

Is it the scum of Russia or China that controls Australia?

I’d suggest that given Mad Mal’s family ties we are controlled by China.

I know this sounds like a broken record, but the man-made energy crisis that started with Weizsacker mistaken definition of nuclear binding energy in ordinary atoms in 1935, will vanish when Weizsacker’s mistake is publicly corrected and the public is allowed to know the amount of energy available in each atom.

“I know this sounds like a broken record, but the man-made energy crisis that started with Weizsacker mistaken definition of nuclear binding energy in ordinary atoms in 1935, will vanish when Weizsacker’s mistake is publicly corrected and the public is allowed to know the amount of energy available in each atom.”

Oliver,
Your determination to fix this gross scientific error is commendable. Weizsacker, like anyone else may have made many mistakes of ‘binding energy’, whatever that may possibly be. He also had but few folk to point out out some quantum nonsense! We now have much quantum political BS to be flushed down the Quantum chromodynamic terlit!

Nuclear mass power\energy is so vast that available (useful) nuclear energy\power is mc² or mc²/2 does not matter. The scale from thermal power\energy is such that even mc²/1000 is fine for engineering planing for ‘power to do work! You want to see my new submarine\carrier\icebreaker power source?
All the best! -will-

Oliver,
Good idea! Only model the demonstration needed to separate the physical from the fantasy! When will the arrogant academics learn, that no-matter how rapidly ‘The Book of Knowledge’ grows, ‘The Book of Misunderstanding\Error’ grows, more rapidly?
Teach only from ‘The Book of Misunderstanding\Error’. The kids must ‘learn’ at their own pace, else they only memorize error. We can only try to keep them from blowing themselves up.
‘I do not know’, is always a correct answer! Adding ‘but lets go find out’, turns the journeyman into a ‘mentor’.

It is a huge structure 1400 miles tall across a different areas of the Coral sea. From what I read, large Southern areas are not affected at all, some areas partly affected and the most Northern have experienced large scale bleaching, which may be a perfectly natural event. Coral flourishes in much hotter water in other places and has existed for millenia through hotter and colder periods, so I suggest it is simply a natural and regular phenomenon. It comes back quickly enough and we have seen this before. Cyclonic damage can be severe, but this has dropped dramatically but that is not newsworthy. Greenpeace have been caught using photos of cyclone damaged reef to document Climate Change. However never before have we had so many ecologists studying the reef and looking for jobs paddling around in scuba gear in paradise at our expense.

Also the latest Global Warming theory is apparently that CO2 now exclusively heats water, not the air and so fossil fuel is killing the reef. For the NYT this is on a par with all the missing caribou, penguins and polar bears killed by Climate Change. I note that the number of threatened Adele penguins in Antarctica this week just doubled by three million as they counted the ones which did not come home often. Climate Change is a problem looking for victims. It’s a wonder the NYT does not blame Donald Trump.

John Smith:
back in 1961 I went on a school trip to the Barrier Reef. The boat didn’t go to the area listed in the brochure and when I asked I was told that “the colour has faded. It does that every so often. It will come back in a year or two”.

The current “crisis” coincides, as it has for 20 odd years, with summer being warmer than other seasons and the next round of Research Grants.

What appears to be happening at the moment is another bleaching event is developing, only a year after the last.

At the moment, needs a little time to confirm if thats true or not but not looking good. Development of a weak El Nino this year could tie in with it.

Problem is multiple bleachings happening before reef gets a chance to recover. What i’m seeing reported now is that the damage this year is occurring at different sites as well. Bad is that Coral dies, Algae takes over and keeps Coral from re-establishing. That changes the make up of many different populations on the reef.

A good, basic reference if you are interested in developments is the Australian BOM site for Sea Surface Temps.

I live right on the southern section of the Great Barrier Reef, and I can assure you that it is not ‘dead’. In fact, over the last 3 years, the southern section has shown a 300% increase of coral. Only some sections in the north, north of Cairns, have shown some bleaching. Greenpeace were discovered showing pictures of coral bleaching which were in fact taken in American Samoa. All these scare tactics have done, is to reduce the number of overseas tourists coming to visit our wonderful reef. Numbers were 60% down last year and effects the economy of the small coastal towns.

For many years, I had my own business, working in the tourist industry in a small town, and eventually had to close because of the dwindling numbers of tourists. Cancellations from overseas because people were convinced there was nothing left to see !

Let’s don’t trivialize the “southern tip”. The southern section is 366 miles from north to south and 155 miles wide.
And, no one said the Eco-loons, Greenpeace, did the research, They only supplied the Fake pictures.
Come up sometime and have a look !

Instead of snowy 2.0 how about growing a pair and building new dams ?
Being a land of droughts having backup water makes sense .
When used by competent operators they can be used for flood mitigation .
If they stagger the use of hydro electric generation we have more base load power .
The recreation aspect also has to be a plus .
We also still need coal fired power into this mix .
Flannery and watermelons won’t agree but there are plenty of sites either side of great dividing range for storage dams that won’t do more harm to the environment than its ultimate worth .
Australia has a history of droughts and according to some up to thirty years in duration .

This is political grandstanding of the tallest order – nothing like watching other people spend billions to solve a problem of their own collective disorganized making…

Myself I’m waiting for the sweet spot between rising electricity prices and decreasing solar battery storage costs (for a given reliability and efficiency) to become clear and I’m going to jump off the grid with a suitable salute to the useless politicians on the way out…. Maybe we need a T-shirt printing

BTW check my link for a solar battery storage comparison table – I’m going make this as complete as I can and keep it up to date – so people have a proper ‘neutral’ resource to refer to, too much vested interests hawking on incomplete info for my liking.

Why not include the AGM lead acid batteries for solar? 3x the mass/kWh, but 1/10 the price/kWh, delivered! Infinitely recyclable when capacity decreases from use! Perfect for stationary power storage where you hate the critters that must steal them every week!

I know I’m coming in late here, so this will probably get lost, but consider this.

This Pumped Hydro plan won’t mean a new dam. Just a new tunnel, the power plant itself, and a pumping station.

In a manner similar to Tumut Three, which has a Nameplate of 1650MW, the water flows down the pipes to the six turbines in the Turbine Hall, driving the turbine which then drives the generator, delivering power at a time when it is needed, four hours, six hours, or so, selling the power for the best price they can get, usually $55 to $65/MWH. Then at a time when power is cheap, say 3.30AM when the only supply is from coal fired power, and the wholesale cost of electricity is (around) $30/MWH, the water which has flowed down the pipes is pumped back up into the dam.

That’s how they make their profit.

However, see something important here.

This pumped hydro plant generates electricity, but it also consumes electricity to pump that water back to the ‘top pondage/dam’.

The cost will be, well, $2Billion Plus.

For around the same cost, they could construct a new HELE USC coal fired plant, probably with a larger Nameplate, which instead of supplying and consuming power (this pumped hydro) would just supply power, more of it, because it is delivering all the time, instead of delivering/consuming.

It would also probably be constructed in less time as well.

And from that time thing, note how they are bagging this hydro because it takes so long, when we need the power …..NOW.

There is no power plant which can deliver the power ….. NOW.

They will all take four to seven years to get built to the power delivery stage, and that’s all power plants, no matter what type.

Pumped Storage is a great idea, but be aware it is a power consumer as well as a power deliverer.

Thanks for answering my question from entry #11 about how much coal fired power station 2 billion can buy.

This Snowy upgrade will never happen. Already the irrigators who use water from the scheme are asking questions about their water supply. Imagine the fight that would happen during the inevitable drought, farmers wanting the water for crops and governments needing it to keep the lights on in urban areas!

That’s the thing people forget, the Snowy scheme was designed to turn the rivers of the Snowy mountains inland for irrigation, the electricity generation was just a side benefit to help pay for it.

This is all about politicians who even in a crisis can not bring themselves to utter the word coal, much less nuclear, desperately grasping at any straw to paper over the fact that they have allowed crackpot green energy to punch holes in the electricity grid.

The political leadership in this country is absolutely pathetic but as we vote in democratic elections it is sadly our own fault that we have the leaders we have.

Tony,
Another problem with this that the power supplied at night is usually supplied by some coal generator at a loss. This is because of the significant costs timing of of restarts makes its a better deal to keep units on and supply at a loss.

This presents further problems for coal generators the next day as the pump storage then takes up some of the profitable supply and displaces some of the coal generators. This obviously affects there profitability.

This was OK when the electricity system was a cost based government service but it makes less sense with respect to a market situation.

It takes more energy to pump water to the top of a hill than it will make coming back down, so you have a net loss, and that requires a lot of expensive infrastructure to do it. It will give you power any time it is needed, but it is an inefficient way to produce electricity. Coal, Gas, Nuclear, can do this without any need for additional storage. It is simply adding another inefficient solution to solve an inefficient problem.

If your windmill or coal unit is generating power that is not required at night, why not use it for water pumping ? Mt Piper NSW is kept hot all night even if it is not selling electricity because it provides about 15% of the power to NSW during day-time.
Cooling causes contraction stress damage.
A cold start uses thousands of $ of diesel and 72 hours of careful monitoring prior to selling electricity to the grid.

This is the thing I don’t get. I have heard all the stories about batteries, pumped storage, aluminium, and a host of other methods to store energy.

Storage can only occur when there is excess capacity in the system, any system, whether it be electricity, water, or even money !

So, at the moment we seem to have, at times an excess of generating capacity and some of the excess can be used to charge batteries or pump water up hill.

So, what happens when Hazelwood goes off line ? Where is the extra capacity in the system whereby excess can be stored ?

I have read here, Tony I think, said that the wind plants will not be able to cover the deficit after Hazelwood has gone, so where is the excess energy going to come from to charge batteries or pump water ?

Seems to me there will be no excess in the system after Hazelwood closes, I guess the batteries will come pre charged, use them up, what then ? Where does the extra 100MW come from plus losses, to re charge the battery ? ?

I can see the politicians are so used to living in a world that you can get heaps of goodies for nothing, that they have lost sight of the fact that you have to have an excess of anything before you can save it.

For more than 20 years now, they have building the things here in Australia. They ramped it up around the year 2000, and began constructing large scale wind plants.

So, here we are, now 17 years later, and they still don’t generate enough power to replace one ancient power plant slated for closure.

You tell me how good wind power is now.

They can store the excess wind power (excess, give me strength) in batteries for later use, but you either consume the power as it is being generated, or use that SAME power to charge batteries to supply what would only amount to be minutes while a REAL power plant can be run up to supply demand, a gas fired OCGT emitting CO2.

Seems straightforward to me, all that the Snowy II Scheme can do is store power.
It does not generate power of itself. The power has to from some other source of current production.
So where is the gain? The power for the new Snowy storage will likely have to come from any excess coal fired power.
All very expensive just to avoid the Co2 emissions.
How correct or otherwise is my analysis? Appreciate any comments.
GeoffW

Geoffrey:
At the moment all politicians are trying to avoid emissions from the public – about blackout, high electricity bills and loss of jobs.
Weatherdill is frantically trying to avoid blackouts before the election (12 months to the day) and it is unlikely he will get his gas plant built in time. Even if he does it doesn’t solve the problem but it ‘spins’ the idea that Private companies refused to turn on their gas plant (that it didn’t have fuel available, couldn’t get to full power in less than 4 hours not the 30 minutes demanded (wrong type), and was shut down because it was losing money and would have lost more if run in an on/off cycle). The batteries are a con to look as if it is up-to-date (the Greens think batteries will work) and the diesel generators he want SA Power Network to install aren’t being emphasised even though they will be the most effective response.
Turnbull is promoting a scheme that has been filed away for 40 years. They must have done a desperate search to find something/anything to counter Weatherdill. It won’t solve the crisis for years, and not at all if they allow more wind turbines to be built.
The Adelaide Advertiser today was interesting (I don’t normally buy it but the headlines were eye catching) and Weatherdill was under fire on several pages, even The Letters to the Editor. His “when in trouble blame Canberra” approach hasn’t got much support from the public.

Appreciate your comments Graham;
Weatherdill has a poor grasp on the power situation not only in SA but for all of Australia. Mal is closer to the money but he is too ‘soft’. I think we on this site all agree that what we need is coal power. Come on Malcolm have some guts!
GeoffW

It seems to me that Malcolm has come up with the New Snowy II scheme for a number of reasons;
1. He will not be building a new coal fired carbon emitting power station so that he will appease the greens and the left.
2. By adding to the Snowy system he is tapping into a large amount public good will and warm fuzzy post war ‘Snowy Hydro’ nostalgia of the good old days!
3. It’s a vast project and will provide a huge stimulus to the economy. Malcolm’s name will be engraved forever in history.
I would describe it all in 2 words; shitless & witless.
Geoffw

Around 1980 I lived near Llanberis in North Wales where they were building the Dinorwig Pump Storage Scheme. It was built to absorb surplus night-time generation from the Wylfa Head nuclear plant. I went round both facilities and studied how they operated and was pleasantly surprised to find that the pay-back time was quite short. At the time I was also studying the Au Snowy Scheme.
It makes sense for Au to adapt the existing hydro infra-structure as a grid “battery” and to augment it with wind-turbines and a small gas-cooled reactor at Tumut.
The current Au private-ownership generating model means that cheaper night-time electricity can be used for the pumping activity while day-time peak price electricity can be derived from the hydro scheme. It does not matter that energy is lost through pumping water uphill because wind turbines and nuclear reactors produce electricity whether it is sold to the grid or not.
The Snowy Scheme suffers from it’s remote location away from large cities and industry but perhaps the Au Govt could promote industrial relocation to the region and offer stable long-term cheap electricity.
As an aside to nuclear I’d like to see someone developing “vacuum-flask” double walled steam pipes (say 50mm ID) so that waste steam could be used to drive industrial parks around a reactor (or coal unit). A huge amount of energy is wasted by dumping this heat to cooling towers or lakes when it could be piped to local industry and then on to public buildings requiring space heating.

…..so that waste steam could be used to drive industrial parks around a reactor (or coal unit). A huge amount of energy is wasted by dumping this heat to cooling towers or lakes when it could be piped to local industry and then on to public buildings requiring space heating.

This is basically what is called CHP (Combined Heat and Power) these days referred to as Cogeneration or Trigeneration.

It’s not a new process, as it has been in pretty regular use in New York, (Manhattan mainly) since 1880, and that’s not a typo, as it is 1880, and here, think of that iconic image of Marilyn Monroe with her white dress billowing out.

I originally wrote about this in my original Series when I started out, and rather than explain it here, because it is fairly complex, I’ll include two links to Posts of my own about just this subject, CHP

At that second link, I have a further link to a very large database in the Post (about half way down, and just above the image there) showing just how widespread this actually is, and it’s no small thing either as, overall, the Nameplate in question is around 6,000MW, and now after those nine years, probably considerably greater than that even.

Incidentally, note the dates on these Posts, June 2008, nine years ago now.

Funny, when I went searching for an image indicating CHP in Manhattan, it came up with that image in a few of the links, and I could find no mention of the Train pressure wave, which, incidentally, is easier to believe now than CHP, which would be warm steam, not easily visible in the Summer Months.

Thanks for the links Tony. Always appreciate your contributions and numbers.
I agree, using the low grade “waste” heat is nothing new but most people seem unaware of just how much energy is being wasted when we generate electricity. The bed-wetters harp on about reducing CO2 emissions by 10% but we could do this without compromising our life-styles.

Above at 13.1.1. Ceetee and Peter C mention the Fabian Society.
Do please think about bookmarking the following as a favourite. It is a speech by Bob Hawke marking the Centenary of the Fabian Society, delivered in 1984, about at the peak of his alcoholic rants, when he was assaulting our cherished and efficient system of Government for the sake of ideology.http:///www.geoffstuff.com/fabian.pdf
Make no mistake, this is careful and deliberate stuff. Hake was no fool. He had built up a system that delivered to him as PM an enormous resource of governmental advice at the highest level and he proceeded to implement what he favoured and what he could, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly.
By my analysis of political action, I would classify some of the Hawke legacy as worthy of investigation for treason. Worst was the actions that fitted some aims of the Fabian Society. This speech illustrates the power an ideology to enslave, to overcome analysis by rationality and common sense.
In my career in the mining sector, my employer suffered directly to the tune of an unknown number of dollars, probably exceeding $1 billion, from the compulsory loss of prior title to explore and mine on some areas of land under which we had found the makings of more new uranium mines. The mechanism for our deprivation was via the United Nations World Heritage Convention that Australia had ratified in 1974.
It was clever to for Government to use such a motherhood concept, seen bu the public as capable only to produce good outcomes, as a Trojan Horse to implant into the resources sector, for steely but unconscionable control of freedoms of enterprise that all of us had enjoyed until then. So our loss was a neat example of Fabian principles at work.
Geoff.

These manipulations of power and money are not easy for the public to see and appreciate.

An illustration of public confusion created by the media is in the reporting on the “gas” crisis by two well known writers; Terry Mc and Alan K. They expressed views that allocated blame to different parties.

In one piece it sounded as though the companies running power generation were totally corrupt, where my own take was that they were the victims of government abuse and were therefore feeling entitled to game the system in order to minimise losses.

The media: presenting opposing views on the same page and having a few Bob each way.

Thanks Geoff for the write up. Anytime I have mentioned the Fabian Society and the “March through the institutions”, I’m regarded as a ‘nut case’, but I have been around long enough to see the operations of them and others to bring the west down.
I could write heaps here, but others should do their own research. I will mention one thing that will make things that are going on in the world seem much clearer. Not only research The Fabians but also the Bilderberg Group and their connections.

In 1948, the Bilderberg Group along with others, including the Fabians, gave themselves 70 years to complete their plan in bringing down the west. 2018 would have been right in the middle of Hillary Clinton’s Presidency. They almost made it. Thus the Uproar in the USA today. Europe first, almost completed, USA, almost there but for Trump, Russia last, taken out by economic pressure from the USA. ( Why do you think Obama put the sanctions on Russia, what ?? because he thought Russia had interfered in the recent elections ?? )

You should all go and watch this movie, and pinch yourselves to remind yourselves that this movie was made 30 years ago. Just see how the predictions have come true.

Wind- non-scalable, unreliable, hideously expensive, short lived, high maintenance, unstable power, fractional production vs. rated power…what is not to like?
And using wind to pump water to flood a valley and then release it later? Let us see:
Low efficiency wind, convert to electricity, transmit to pumps, run pumps, water later spins turbines, converts to electricity, feeds grid.
So: Wind > electricity > transmit > pump > storage > generation > transmission. So at least seven power losing steps, that involves turning wildscape into industrial wind parks, killing birds, disturbing land based life, flooding a valley. And of course more. All to save exactly what?